WebGIS technologies in the representation of the semantic chains of real estate markets

"Within the course of Environmental Economics and Property Valuation held in Architecture Degree Course of the University of Catania - Syracuse - practical activities are planned concerning the assessment of the architectural heritage and the analysis of the local real estate market. The learning experiences that support the theoretical content and the methodological discipline converge in the preparation of a report concerning property valuation and the assessment of buildings’ costs of maintenance and transformation. The project works are carried out individually, or in groups, according to the complexity of the issue. In order to use a unified valuation approach, a standard pattern IT is provided to students. In its broadest extension, if the group is engaged in the analysis of a property investment concerning the retention/conversion of a building, the IT assists students in the following operations: • Preparing the report concerning the environment, the building, the building unit, the market analysis, the procedure, the quantities, the results and conclusions;

Surveying part of the building apt to transformation according to a logical model that reconstitutes on a spreadsheet the topological unity of the building;

Listing activities related to the items of the current price lists for public works;

Implementing data in a general database, which collects all information and prepares the synthetic and analytical application; Constructing the indexes for quality control;

Preparing the economic calculations;

Constructing feedback procedures and test the results.

The growing availability of data on the network, good and bad, the development of information technologies as GIS and Geo-Database, and the experiences of both in research and in practice, constitute the basis for achieving a robust connection between the tutorial and the platform of analysis that the working groups use, and continue to evolve. With particular reference to the analysis of the housing market, a tool was built that allows merging the data collected by the students in a single database without having to input it manually. Another advantage of this tool is the opportunity of verifying the quality of real-time data with respect to their implementation. The detection system of market data consists of a general Geo-Database, which collects the data entered by the students, who are allowed accessing to the portion of this database. Simultaneous access is available via web from different locations, without conflict. As the database grows the information overlap and integrated, it returns a representation of the urban context more and more complex and precise. The proposed model is a platform for critical analysis and evaluation of the value by which these features and capabilities are explained to be a topic of discussion for decisionmakers."